The importance of milk in a diet has been accepted so generally that scant attention has been given high cereal diets without milk, although the subject merits serious consideration, because rice eating races in the Orient not only have survived over a long period of time on this sort of diet, but have increased in numbers in spite of devastating epidemic diseases and an inadequate economic margin in years of flood and famine.
In China, one is struck by the fine physique, excellent teeth, strength and endurance of coolies, who have never tasted milk and who live on a diet in which rice furnishes a large proportion of the caloric intake. For example, in one day I have ridden as much as forty miles over country roads in China in a jinricksha drawn by a single coolie.
Cowgill and his associates1 have made significant studies of the effect of